Source:
Yahoo! News/Associated PressBy SUE LINDSEY, Associated Press Writer 9 minutes ago
BLACKSBURG, Va. - Like the people of New York, Oklahoma City and Littleton, Colo., the Virginia Tech community faces a difficult decision on what it will do with the scene of a tragedy.
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The university has made no plans beyond cleaning and repairing the flat-roofed, oblong stone structure, which has remained under police guard since the killing spree.
However, faculty, students and alumni have already weighed in with suggestions for Norris' future, one of more than 100 buildings on Virginia Tech's 2,600-acre campus. Built in the early 1960s, it houses the department of engineering science and mechanics.
Ideas for the building's future range from returning it to use as classrooms to making it a memorial or even knocking it down.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070505/ap_on_re_us/virginia_tech_shooting_norris_hall
Personally, I feel that they should gut the building, put a memorial in the central entrance, and re-dedicate the building in the name of the victims. Such action would create a
living memorial for the victims in the name of academic research. The OKC model of literalizing people's deaths and creating a
terra nova for hollowed ground is a bad idea. As someone who has obsessively followed the rebuilding debate over at the WTC (although not as much in the last two years, since I feel that it has become a circle-jerk for the "Freedom Tower") I remember hearing some of the worst arguments being made for leaving all of those 16 acres vacant. However, commonsense prevailed in the case of the WTC, as public opinion opposed making the WTC into another OKC.